Jonathan Ross salary 'outstrips Today programme budget'

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Radio 4’s flagship Today programme has a smaller budget than Jonathan Ross’s salary, it was reported today.

While Ross, who recently finished his suspension over the prank calls row involving Andrew Sachs, is said to pocket £6m a year, the Today team receives around £3.5m to £4m, according to the London Evening Standard.

But the newspaper said that Today also uses facilities from all over the world which are hard to quantify and not paid for by the programme.

The BBC said it does not discuss individual programme budgets.

In January it was revealed that the Today programme has 6.6 million listeners – up nearly half a million from the previous quarter and its largest audience since the end of 2001.

The listener upsurge was attributed, in part, to the impact of the economic downturn meaning people turned to Radio 4 for information.

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Ross famously joked at the British Comedy Awards in 2007 that he was “worth 1,000 BBC journalists” – a comment described by the National Union of Journalists as “obscene” at a time when the BBC was cutting thousands of jobs.